If/when you do find an actual wormhole, you're going to love having plasma carronades guarding it. Though you'll want a lot of them, and with as quick reactions as possible.

My wormhole guard TG spent seven years watching the swirling colours before their doom came through and obliterated them in about thirty seconds. Talk about a downer. 

Yeah sorry, jump points. Been playing a game that calls jump points wormholes, so... Got confused.

Nice idea about the asteroid, though in the system in question I have a major planets which is rather close to the jump point so I set my maintenance facilities there.

Still, really effective, we will see Assuming I continue this game, the slowdowns has reached almost intolerable levels, even for me. 2 minutes for a 1 day advancement is a bit.. much. I need a better pc XD

P.S. With a close enough maintenance station/planet, or a permanent defense point, you could even use a starbase. Make a ship with no engine or fuel (except perhaps for shields?) and tug it there. Maximum space for weapons. when needed for maintenance, tug it back. Build 4 or so, and always keep one in maintenance and 3 at the jump point.

I've come to realise that with carronades you might as well forget that they have range at all, pretty much like gauss cannons.
They're basically just for getting really close to something and punching right through whatever shield and armour layers it has in one pop. Which is awesome by the way, but only if you can get there.

I use carronades for my wormhole guards, because of that. When there is a wormhole I really want to guard, I build slow ships, with long maintenance life and as many carronades as I can cram in them. They TF train to 100% and go guard that wormhole. That working under the assumption that , because I'm doing conventional start, the enemies have better ships anyway. Might as well try to alpha strike them while they're sensor deaf.

Never been in a real big fight yet, but whatever comes through 120 x 25 cm carronades should do some real damage even if they only shoot once.

Never tested in battle mind you, cause I am a noob and nobody actually ever came through that wormhole ....

Unless I'm missing something, the carronade line looks terrible to invest heavily in.  It seems close enough to a laser without half the research options and a worse damage type.  To add insult to injury, research project and manufacturing costs are higher compared to infrared lasers of the same size. . .  initial RP saved from starting with a higher focal size may not last if we want to keep up to date.

On fast ships, entry-level railguns and entry-level carronades may work for a low investment - efficient point defense, an adequate damage dealer out of the box.  With research mostly put into capacitors, we won't have wasted much even if the guns are a dead end.

Research costs are as follows.
10 cm laser- 1000 points
Infrared laser 500 points
15 cm carronade - 1000 points
20cm carronade - 2000 points
For both:
Capacitor recharge 1 - 1000 points
Capacitor recharge 2 - 2000 points
Capacitor recharge 3 - 4000 points

Also the drives and power plants were ion tech which is a significant investment.
I suppose I should have either used 15 cm carronades with their 30k range advantage, or upped the lasers to UV which would leave the carronade with 40k range advantage, this would have required more work to remain at range, as at that range each weapon would only produce 1 point each.
Perhaps I should have mentioned that these ships were using basically the tech that my game first rolled with, except for capacitor recharge 3 which i researched myself.

4) Setting a ship to follow at 60K resulted in a range of 41k between ships, altering the order to follow at 50k lowered the range to 31K. I can definately work with this.

This is because of task force initiative. As you can see the difference in your cases is always 19K km / 5 sec = 3'800 km/s. Recognize this number from anywhere?

If the task force trying to flee has the higher initiative they will move last and thus keep the correct range.


I actually really dislike this effect, especially lategame. It mean that fighters with a speed of 60000 km/s with Gauss weaponry (limited to 10k range) in some cases can never catch a lategame freighter moving at 5000 km/s if the freighters captain has a higher initiative... very silly!

Some damn good science!

I've found a small mistake in the test ships, as recharge 3 was being used for the lasers but not the carronade. Here are the revised ships:

Carronade Test Drone class Strike Cruiser    17,000 tons     509 Crew     2198.8 BP      TCS 340  TH 1224  EM 0
3600 km/s     Armour 4-58     Shields 0-0     Sensors 36/6/0/0     Damage Control Rating 6     PPV 144
Maint Life 1.71 Years     MSP 485    AFR 385%    IFR 5.4%    1YR 201    5YR 3013    Max Repair 153 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months    Spare Berths 0    

306 EP Ion Drive x1.5 (4)    Power 306    Fuel Use 182.98%    Signature 306    Exp 15%
Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres    Range 5.8 billion km   (18 days at full power)

20cm C3 Plasma Carronade (24)    Range 100,000km     TS: 3600 km/s     Power 10-3     RM 1    ROF 20        10 5 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1
Fire Control S04 96-3000 (2)    Max Range: 192,000 km   TS: 3000 km/s     95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Technology PB-1 (16)     Total Power Output 72    Armour 0    Exp 5%

Active Search Sensor MR5-R1 (1)     GPS 96     Range 5.8m km    MCR 627k km    Resolution 1
Active Search Sensor MR25-R20 (1)     GPS 1920     Range 25.8m km    Resolution 20
Thermal Sensor TH6-36 (1)     Sensitivity 36     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  36m km
EM Detection Sensor EM1-6 (1)     Sensitivity 6     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  6m km

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
Laser Test Drone class Cruiser    17,000 tons     636 Crew     2218.8 BP      TCS 340  TH 1224  EM 0
3600 km/s     Armour 4-58     Shields 0-0     Sensors 36/6/0/0     Damage Control Rating 5     PPV 129
Maint Life 1.71 Years     MSP 449    AFR 420%    IFR 5.8%    1YR 186    5YR 2794    Max Repair 153 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months    Spare Berths 2    

306 EP Ion Drive (4)    Power 306    Fuel Use 182.98%    Signature 306    Exp 15%
Fuel Capacity 920,000 Litres    Range 5.3 billion km   (17 days at full power)

10cm C3 Infrared Laser (43)    Range 30,000km     TS: 3600 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 1    ROF 5        3 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S04 96-3000 (2)    Max Range: 192,000 km   TS: 3000 km/s     95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Technology PB-1 (28)     Total Power Output 126    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Technology PB-1 (6)     Total Power Output 2.7    Armour 0    Exp 5%

Active Search Sensor MR5-R1 (1)     GPS 96     Range 5.8m km    MCR 627k km    Resolution 1
Active Search Sensor MR25-R20 (1)     GPS 1920     Range 25.8m km    Resolution 20
Thermal Sensor TH6-36 (1)     Sensitivity 36     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  36m km
EM Detection Sensor EM1-6 (1)     Sensitivity 6     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  6m km

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
One note about the design, the lasers have lower maintenance requirements, so one engineering spaces was swapped for a small one, and also 80,000 litres of fuel needed to be sacrificed in order to make room for more powerplants, this was considered to be an acceptable sacrifice in order to maximise performance within the 17kton hull space limit.
Apart from that, both ships are exactly the same, except for weapons and number of powerplants.

Edit: Both fleets near each other, distance is now 107k, each 5 second increment reduces range by 36k.

TEST 1.
Decision is made to hold fire untill point blank range, just like previous test.
Fire controls are set up, all crew wait tensely for the moment of action.
Contact! Both fleets open fire simultaneously at 0k distance, a fairly significant anomaly caused by the 5 second increments it would be expected for the laser ships to fire immediately at 30k, while the carronades would wait until 10k distance.
43 Lasers fire at 83% : 37 laser hits , 6 misses. 37x3 = 111 damage lands on target. Damage of 3 mostly fails to penetrate armour level of 4.
24 carronades fire @ 83% : 20 hits, 4 misses. 10x20 = 200 damage lands on target.  Damage of 10 causes significant damage to primary armour layer and barely penetrates down 2 more layers, but each consequent hit has increasingly higher chance of landing on already compromised armour, there is very high chance internal damage.

Damage results: Analysing the combat logs seems to show the laser ship firing first, causing minor damage to systems before the carronade ship can retaliate.
Carronade ship:
16 armour damaged out of 58
3 plasma carronades destroyed.
1 engine recieved damage lower than it's HTK, causing it to be spared.
Laser ship:
27 Armour out of 58
3 Ion drives
2 reactors (out of 28)
1 engineering spaces
1 fire control
1 small reactor
3 crew quarters
1 fuel storage large
12 lasers
1 fuel storage small
1 thermal sensor
Bridge

1 shock damage was recieved causing the first internal hit which knocked out the first engine.
Speed slowed to 900km/s
Carronade ship decides to retreat at max speed to take advantage of range difference, 2 time increments should be enough to get out of laser ships range, 4 would be required to recharge carronade.
(AT this point i make a backup in case i screw this test up like that last one)
Edit: Well the carronade fleet is awaiting acknowledgement so i think order delay was what screwed up the last test)
Predictably the laser ship waited around 20 seconds and got finished off cleanly.  2 Additional shock damage was delivered during the coup de grace .
I'm just going to rollback and see if I can fix the order delay.
Edit: Switched off inexperienced fleet penalties before giving the orders, everything is good now.
Increment 2:
18 k now seperates 2 fleets.
Laser ship fires it's remaining 31 lasers.28 hit, 3 miss. At this range there is only 1 damage per laser.
4 additional armour damaged.
1 carronade damaged.
Increment3: Range increased to 31k, out of the lasers range. 2 more ticks untill carronades are recharged.
Increment5: Distance ramains at 31k
Carronades fire.
All 20 remaining carronades hit. 3 damage each at this range.
Additional Damage:
4 Armour
7 reactors
1 engineering spaces
1 fire control
1 crew quarters
2 fuel storage
19 lasers (12 left)
5 fuel storage small
1 active sensor MR25-R20
1 active sensor MR5-R1

No fire control, so completely crippled.
But the other fleet doesn't know that and might keep the range open. Order is made to keep range open at 45k.
20 seconds later and it's all over.